Ellen Glasgow Quotes

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

There is a terrible loneliness in the spring ...

Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practice religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature.

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.

I've liked life well enough, but I reckon I'll like death even better as soon as I've gotten used to the feel of it ... I shouldn't be amazed to find it less lonely than life after I'm once safely settled.

Nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.

The great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

If broken hearts could kill, the earth would be as dead as the moon.

A successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions.

The only differnce between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.

Youth is always an enemy to the old ...

I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.

Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy ...

The novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung.

The truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a hard driver.

The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

A doctrine of endurance flows easily from our lips when we are enduring jam and our neighbors dry bread, and it is still possible for us to become resigned to the afflictions of our brother.

Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.

What was time itself but the bloom, the sheath enfolding experience? Within time, and with time alone, there was life - the gleam, the quiver, the heartbeat, the immeasurable joy and anguish of being ...

It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt.

Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.

Audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.

Cynicism is a sure sign of youth.

The things I feared were not in the sky, but in the nature and in the touch of humanity. The cruelty of children ... the blindness of the unpitiful - these were my terrors. But not the crash of thunder overhead, not the bolts of fire from the clouds.

Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth.

Dignity is an anachronism.

True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity.

The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

She must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest-in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories.

The world of the egotist is, inevitably, a narrow world, and the boundaries of self are limited to the close horizon of personality ... But, within this horizon, there is room for many attributes that are excellent ...

Cruelty is the only sin.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

The share of the sympathetic publisher in the author's success - the true success so different from the ephemeral - is apt to be overlooked in these blatant days, so it is just as well that some of us should keep it in mind.

Life is never what one dreams. It is seldom what one desires, but for the vital spirit and the eager mind, the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the possibility of high adventure.

One cannot lay a foundation by scattering stones, nor is a reputation for good work to be got by strewing volumes about the world ...

After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances.

Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar.

The age is a vociferous one, and no prophet is without honor who is able to strike an attitude and to speak loud enough to make himself heard.

Beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.

A self-made martyr is a poor thing.

In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority.

It is only in the heart that anything really happens.

First, I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist.

Do you know there is always a barrier between me and any man or woman who does not like dogs?

Energy had fastened upon her like a disease.

You can't fit the same religion to every man any mo' than you can the same pair of breeches. The big man takes the big breeches an' the little man takes the small ones, an' it's jest the same with religion. It may be cut after one pattern, but it's might apt to get its shape from the wearer inside. Why, thar ain't any text so peaceable that it ain't drawn blood from somebody.

Nothing is more trying than nerves to people who have none.

There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.

What fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them.

Anger and jealousy are spasms of the nerves, not of the heart.

1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over. 2. Always preserve within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries. 3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavor to touch life on every side; but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable.

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.

A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it.

We love from little motives, not for large reasons.

Happiness is a hardy annual.

No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it for example by seeing it how it could be worse and then being grateful it isn't.

Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.

Nobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity.

Yes, I learned long ago that the only satisfaction of authorship lies in finding the very few who understand what we mean. As for outside rewards, there is not one that I have ever discovered.

When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release?

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.

[Reformers] might be classified as a distinct species having eyes in the back of their heads.

What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind.

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

But youth isn't happy. Youth is sadder than age.

It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.

Human nature. I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

There is no monster more destructive than the inventive mind that has outstripped philosophy.

Though he was only twenty-six, he felt that he had watched the decay and dissolution of a hundred years. Nothing of the past remained untouched. Not the old buildings,

Theories have nothing to do with life ...

I hated the things they believe in, the things they so innocently and charmingly pretended. I hated the sanctimonious piety that let people hurt helpless creatures. I hated the prayers and the hymns - the fountains and the red images that coloured their drab music, the fountains filled with blood, the sacrifice of the lamb.

Irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay.

You could have forgiven my committing a sin if you hadn't feared that I had a committed a pleasure as well.

It is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.

Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.

I ain't never seen no head so level that it could bear the lettin' in of politics.

That was the worst of being poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness.

I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into 'em ...

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.

Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.

I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop ... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.

Women love with their imagination and men with their senses.

A good novel cannot be too long nor a bad novel too short.

So long as the serpent continues to crawl on the ground, the primary influence of woman will be indirect ...

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.

What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.

Grandfather used to say that when a woman got ready to fall in love the man didn't matter, because she could drape her feeling over a scarecrow and pretend he was handsome ...

Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.

Convictions ... are always getting in the way of opportunities.

The suitable is the last thing we ever want.

After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.